That S#!t Kreay

Kreayshawn's designer-bashing "Gucci Gucci" video scored her 30 million YouTube hits and a seven-figure record deal. Then this oddball ex-pimp from Oakland promptly picked fights with Nicki Minaj and the boss, Rick Ross. GQ's Lauren Bans spends an extremely bizarre New Year's with the most popular, most reviled white-girl rapper around

Kreayshawn kicks all the dudes out of the hotel room. It’s just three hours before her New Year’s Eve show in San Francisco, and she’s acting uncharacteristically withdrawn. Meanwhile her ragtag entourage is engaged in standard pre-party activities. A skinny black rapper is perched on the nightstand rolling a blunt approximately the size of Vito Corleone’s middle finger. The room is Bay Area-foggy with weed smoke and everyone else is crunking against the seventeenth-story window to blaring radio rap. But Kreay’s propped up against the headboard of a double bed, finger-pecking at her phone and sharing only the occasional comment. Like when a remid version of Lana Del Rey comes on: "What is this depressing shit? I’m going to slit my ankles." This was not her usual demeanor. After all, this is a girl who pegs herself as a "bad bitch" and who, as soon as she felt the spotlight, picked a fight with Nicki Minaj and publicly joked that Rick Ross was so fat he couldn’t find his manhood.

Seeing her in person you realize that she’s awfully small to be starting beefs with Rick Ross. She’s five feet one, tops. From the back she could be 15. From the front, she could be 15. (She’s 22.) Her eyeliner swoops up fiercely at the corners like a Wingdings symbol. Tonight she’s wearing a child-sized dress from Goodwill with white daises that she calls "kinda ugly" as if it’s a compliment. Now she seems so distressed that she’s standing at the foot of the bed bouncing up and down on the balls of her bare feet like a sprinter loosening up before the gun blast.

She corrals the boys out the door. Left in the room is her main posse, a distinctly weird mix of 22-year-old girls who could be the ensemble cast of a TV show about misfit teens. There’s Avian, her soft-voiced childhood neighbor, positioned across the pillows, head propped up by her dark skinny arm, like she’s posing for a cheesecake pinup. Kreay’s personal assistant and roommate, Isabel, a giggly Filipina wearing a gigantic sun hat keeps looking in the mirror and proclaiming herself "sooo L.A." Then there’s a Mohawked videographer in an oversize jeans jacket, Lady Tragik (not her given name), who I probably could have guessed was a lesbian, but she also screamed, "I’m gay and I love Jesus Christ!" down in the hotel lobby earlier. She’s just inserted a giant gold grille over her top front teeth and keeps shining her camera light directly in my eyes asking, "Does this hurt?" It does.

Once the boys are gone, we learn the main reason Kreayshawn’s been so pensive this past hour. And it’s not that the pressure of her newfound, instant fame was bearing down on her with enormous psychic weight. As soon as the door shuts, she yells: "I have to POOP," like a proud potty-trained toddler. This has clearly been on her mind for some time—when I’d originally asked if I could hang out in the room while she got dressed, she’d responded, "Are you going to write about how I pooped, ate nachos, then pooped again? Men won’t like that." Her girlfriends are instantly behind her in this effort, no pun intended. Lady Tragik encourages, "C’mon, girl. Poop thug life," and throws up the West Coast sign. Avian starts pumping her arm, in a sports-stadium chant: "Number two! Number two! Number two!" Kreay pumps her arm too, like an athlete encouraging the cheers. Then Avian puts on a mock-serious tone: "You prairie doggin’ ’?"

Kreayshawn cracks up. I ask, "What’s ’prairie doggin’?" Just trying to be a good reporter. She stops before the door to the bathroom: "You know how a prairie dog kind of pops his head out and then pops it back in?" She bends her spindly arms up like prairie-dog paws and demonstrates with her head bobbing up and down. "That’s what my shit is doing." The bathroom door slides only halfway shut.

Natassia Zolot came up with her stage name when she was a teenager having a very teenage thought: If I don’t create every day, I will die. It’s not pronounced cre-ay-shawn, though—it’s bisyllabic, kray-shawn.

She’d been rapping (and, as important, filming herself rapping) since she was 10. But in May, when she posted her "Gucci Gucci" video on Twitter, it exploded like a corn kernel hitting hot oil. After two weeks, it had garnered 2 million views. In a month it was up to nearly 5 million hits, and Columbia reportedly offered her a seven-figure record deal. The video shows her and her motley gang of friends, looking like prototypical art-school kids, strutting down Rodeo Drive, spitting jabs at the designer storefronts they pass, and sharing a blunt on the hood of a Dodge Challenger. The song itself has ended up a coat hanger for a lot of grand theories. Hip-hop purists celebrated it as a rally cry against the bling fetish that’s overtaken rap this past decade; academic rap nerds went even further and proclaimed that the Marxist hip-hop movement was here. Snoop Dogg anointed her "the missing link between the white girls who all love rap music and all the dudes who rap." And the "haters" hated: Who’s this skinny white chick bastardizing black culture for an audience of cornfed teeny boppers? Whichever Kreayshawn interpretation you subscribe to, her blitzkrieg rise to celebrity is confusing. No one would argue Kreayshawn is an incredible rapper. She may not even be a good rapper. She sounds like a Powerpuff girl who listened to a Lil Wayne album and decided to give freestyling about blunts and bitches a try. Her pace is Sesame Street slow. Her rhymes are…fine. (She may be the first rapper, though, to rhyme over me with ovaries in the "Gucci Gucci" line "Nobody getting over me / I’ve got the swag and it’s pumping out my ovaries.")

Above photo: Dress by Jeremy Scott.

Her skill or lack thereof isn’t really the point. Because she’s weird. Authentically weird. And weird-girl ethos is popular right now. Think of how Christian songstress Katy Perry was rebranded as a blue-haired, girl-kissing, firework-boobed rocker chick or how Lady Gaga is Lady Gaga. But whereas there’s nothing raw about Lady Gaga— her persona is a rigorous, self-conscious reinvention, performance art, really—Kreayshawn actually is the kind of girl who runs her mouth without thinking and then takes a hit from a joint crammed between her friend’s toes. Who presses her forehead against a web camera, making orgasm noises, and then pops up nibbling on her sweatshirt string, yelling into the lens, "I been in a mental institution!" In the photo art for her "Gucci Gucci" single, she’s wearing ugly librarian glasses while she tongues a thick red Popsicle. Her eyes say defiantly, Fuck you if you make this about sex. And also: Fuck you if you don’t.

Earlier that day, we’d all piled, Scooby-Doo&#x2013;style, into a van and driven through Kreayshawn’s old neighborhood in East Oakland, which was nicknamed "Murder Dubs" in the early ’90s due to a steep rise in people shooting other people for crack. Sitting with us in the van is Isabel; Tragik; Young Hawaii Slim, a member of Chill Black Guys and Kreay’s hype man; Stretch, her manager and muscle all in one; and her tour manager, who goes by the name of Cool Nutz—not because of the temperature of his genitalia but because he’s "not as excitable as your Busta Rhymes, but not totally laid-back, either." Way in back is a sizable kid with goldfish lips, aptly monikered DJ Fatboy. When we first met, he warned me he says "a lot of trippy-ass shit," but in my twelve hours with him, I didn’t hear him say more than four sentences. Later on that night, on the way to the venue, Kreayshawn bolted up with panic, yelling, "Where’s Fatboy?!" He was sitting right behind her wearing the otherworldly expression of a porcelain doll—he’s that quiet.

Kreayshawn likes talking about her childhood, for obvious reasons. When you’re a skinny white girl who wears Minnie Mouse ears, people tend to question the authenticity of your thug-life upbringing. As we turn off the exit marked 23, she whoops: "Oakland, REPPIN’! This is my home turf!" Her old house is a boxy beige bungalow with bright blue window shutters built on an alley street, so there’s not much of a yard. "There were hella kids on this block," she says, and points to an overgrown weed thatch across the street. "We used to play in this field and find hella knives and rusty guns and shit."

Other scenes from an Oakland childhood: Kreayshawn says her mom had a string of suitors, and moved to Canada with one of them when Kreay was 15; Kreay stayed behind, mostly crashing at friends’ houses. That was the year she skipped so many classes her grade point average was "zero point zero." She started smoking weed. She remembers the entry from her diary the day she first inhaled. It reads "Hey, I’m high. Smoked weed today in the park." The next day it was: "Smoked weed again today. I could be a pothead." And the next: "Smoked out of a blunt this time, it was so different! I was really high. Definitely going to be a pothead."

She dropped out of school halfway through sophomore year and started dealing marijuana and occasionally pills. Then she ended up, briefly, an online madam; it came about on a lark, probably while high. "Some girls I was hangin’ out with at the time wanted to do it, and I was like, Well I’m not going to do it, but I can, like, help you arrange it," she says casually. "We had a plan. We were gonna open up a massage parlor in the future and make it a real enterprise. It was gonna be legit. But after a week, some professionals came into the situation. And then the girls were gone." She eventually found herself on the up-and-up. At 19, after filming and editing a handful of music videos for local Bay Area rappers, Kreay spent two semesters at a film school in Berkeley. As we’re speeding back over the Bay Bridge, Kreayshawn mentions offhandedly that she was almost cast on Bad Girls Club. If you’re not familiar with Bad Girls Club, or would like to pretend you’re not familiar with Bad Girls Club, it’s a reality show on the Oxygen network that throws a bunch of female delinquents into the same house, like The Real World but 400 percent more criminal. "I like, filled out the whole thing, went in for an interview," she says. "Then before my second interview, I was watching this episode where this girl got hella bleach thrown on her, and I was like, I don’t want to be on a show where I’ll get chemically poisoned and get jumped out in my sleep and shit. It’s not enough money for that." It’s not hard to imagine Kreayshawn as a reality-TV character, a gangsta Snooki. She kind of already is a reality-TV character.

Once "Gucci Gucci" landed, there were years of her life already online to be discovered, linked to, tweeted about, embedded, watched, rewatched: montages of Oakland dance parties featuring her friends’ sweaty faces. Clips of her smoking dope with the White Girl Mob, which got its name from the fact that they were "just some mobbin’ white girls in Oakland." There are hours and hours of UStream footage of Kreay in a tank, face leaning expectantly into her laptop camera, like a bored girl in a banner ad for live chat sex.

Above photo: Blouse by Joyrich. Bracelet by Pierre Hardy.

Actually, she looks like this a lot, or at least enough times to warrant mention. There’s a music video from before she was famous called "Online Fantasy": Kreayshawn’s in a sheer lace robe when a soft-looking girl wearing a bra apparates through her laptop screen and they commence kissing and heavy petting. It’s all wonderfully self-serious and terrible, not to mention lit like a laser-tag palace. (Kreay told me she is bisexual, but not that bisexual: "I’m, like, a person who likes love. And I can find love in any type of person. I’ve dated girls and I’ve liked girls. But they’re usually straight girls, so it never works out. I mean, I’m not that gay, so I don’t have the energy to convince someone else to be gay, you know?")

It’s impossible to imagine her becoming famous before the Internet, in the same way that it’s impossible to picture Madonna predating MTV. And you can fall down the wormhole of Kreayshawn’s online life the same way you end up unintentionally butt-planted for six hours watching a Jersey Shore marathon or staying up till 3 A.M. clicking through an old high school girlfriend’s 4,000 Facebook pictures.

After Kreayshawn’s out of the bathroom, we repack ourselves into the van and head to the Regency, a mid-size concert venue in Polk Gulch. On the way there she gets a call from a teenage fan, Stacy, who’s flown in from the Midwest for the New Year’s Eve concert. Apparently, Kreayshawn gives out her number. She’s also promised to get Stacy and her mom backstage. She puts the call on speaker.

Kreayshawn: "What up, this is Kreayshawn."

Stacy: "OMG, HI. I’M GONNA FAINT."

Kreayshawn: "How many people you with, Stacy?"

Stacy: "Just my Mom," she replies, breathing like she’s on mile twenty of a marathon.

Kreayshawn: "Okay, go to the merch booth...hello? Are you listening?" [to us] "She’s not even listening!"

There’s a pause, and then a sweet Midwestern voice—think the Mom on That 70’s Show—comes on:

Stacy’s Mom: "Hello! Kreee-shawn? This is Stacy’s Mom! Thank you so much for everything! So you want us to go where?"

Stacy’s Mom: "O-key! Thanks so much Kreee-shawn. You said go up to him and say what?"

Kreayshawn: "Luxton Park Crip Gang."

Stacy’s Mom: "I heard ’Something something China Day?’"

Kreayshawn: "Never mind, just tell him you’re supposed to be backstage."

Stacy’s Mom: "Oh o-key, o-key. You are just so wonderful. Can I put Stacy just back on to say goodbye?"

Kreayshawn: "Yeah."

Stacy’s Mom: "Okay, thanks!"

Stacy again, breathy: "Hello?"

Kreayshawn: "Hey"

Stacy sounds like she could burst into tears any second. "I love you, man."

Kreayshawn: "I love you too."

The backstage at the Regency is the size of a storage compartment, with a dirty dorm couch. There’s maybe ten feet of narrow hallway to stand in if you can’t finagle yourself a position in the room. Just one joint would be sufficient to hot box the area, and there are three going around. Kreay’s White Girl mobster, V-Nasty, is already there. V-Nasty is taller, maybe five feet six, and more menacing than Kreayshawn. She dresses like a skater boy, in oversize tees and space-shoe sneakers. Plus, she’s jumpy—her eyes dart around a lot, like she’s tweakin’ and might pull out a knife and cut you. Or maybe she is actually tweakin’ and about to pull out a knife and cut me.

V-Nasty brought her mom, a sweet blonde woman who looks like she could be a former pageant winner and her aunt, who has dark wet curls and a nose piercing. V-Nasty hasn’t had the best time with the press. For the most part, she’s been that white girl who wouldn’t stop saying the N-word. Not as a racist slur, it’s clear, but in the way a kid who grows up with a dad who yells "cockshit!" every time the Jets miss a pass will one day incorporate "cockshit!" into her vernacular. (That’s her reasoning too, blaming the whole "hood" culture of Oakland: "It’s how I grew up. Motherfuckers never told me to don’t do it or that I was doing something wrong.") Trying to talk to her is like trying to talk to the Joker: She answers questions in a singsong rhyme. For example, when I ask her if she has a New Year’s resolution, she does a little leprechaun dance and sings, "I’m here to get the CH-CH-CH-CH-CHEEEESE, you know what I mean?" I don’t, but I think she’s asking rhetorically, anyway. I chat with her mom, who seems a little out of her element backstage. "Are you proud?" I ask.

"Well... I am," she replies hesitantly, "It’s better than what she was doing before. She really turned her life from a negative to a positive." Her aunt pipes in, "Are you a reporter?" I nod. "Yeah, I thought so." She shoots her sister a wary glance like, Ask these things before you start chatting away. "Listen, here’s all you need to know about Vanessa. She’s always been the way she is. Since she was 5 years old, she’s been that way." And what way is that? At the moment, V-Nasty is a few feet away bent down and hyperbolically grinding her butt against the wall for no apparent reason.

"Just the way she is," her aunt replies.

Above photo: Top and skirt by Mara Hoffman. Stockings by Wolford. Heels by YSL from Barneys New York, Beverly Hills. Earrings by Opening Ceremony.

When Kreayshawn takes the stage at eleven forty-five, the first thing she says to the sea of white faces is, "I’m prolly gonna mess up the countdown tonight, so happy 2012 End of Days." They erupt into hoots and applause. It’s hard to single out her voice when she performs. She’s flanked on both sides by V-Nasty and Hawaii, and they rap every word along with her into the mike, drowning her out. Perhaps this is by design. I could see how Kreayshawn, alone on stage, could be an awkward sight. Her first music video, an over-Autotuned trancelike club song called "Bumpin’ Bumpin’," is almost hard to watch in that regard. It shows her on a roof in an oversize Fred Flintstone sweatshirt swinging her arms in that half-helpless but still determined way dads do when they slam a stiff drink and command themselves, Get up and dance; it’s your child’s wedding, for Chrissakes! She does this move over and over—it’s called "cooking." And that’s what it is, basically. With one arm she holds an imaginary bowl, and with the other she stirs the imaginary contents of the bowl with an imaginary spoon. It’s a comfort move. Cousin to the lawn mower, the grocery cart, the robot—a move invented for the white person to fall back on when the cruel world requires dancing.

During the show, I’m standing with a cluster of backstagers off to the left. Stretch, Isabel, Avian—the entire crew is here. There’s Jeff, a cute hipster kid from Baltimore who won a plane ticket out here after he designed a t-shirt of Kreayshawn’s face superimposed on a cat’s. (Later on that night, Kreayshawn would text Jeff, "Yo, can I sleep in your room?" It was a joke, kind of. She was high. But he was already asleep.) Bopping to the music nearby there is also a pack of five white 16-year-old girls dressed like little hoochie zygotes in tight sparkly minidresses and meticulously straight-ironed hair. Their parents rented a limo to bring them here tonight, and apparently this show of effort was enough to actualize their tiny groupie dreams of hanging with the star. Their limo driver, an older gentlemen in a costumey red tux, somehow ended up backstage, too. He keeps taking iPhone photos of himself posing with a joint in his mouth.

When the lights finally go up at 2 A.M., Kreayshawn climbs down to the floor to take pictures and sign autographs for the fans who’ve stuck it out for this express purpose. Kids hand her pot gifts wrapped in tinfoil like yuppies bringing wine to a dinner party. One girl lifts up her shirt, exposing some ginormous breasts packed into a sparkly black bra, and asks Kreayshawn to autograph them. It’s 3 A.M. by the time she’s done talking to everybody. Still, she’s promised to take a ride in the limo with her 16-year-old fans. The question is, where to? Stretch and Fatboy want food, and Fatboy finally unleashes his forewarned whack- assery in the service of his stomach. He barks at his iPhone, "Siri, find me a motherfuckin’ Denny’s!" When she comes back with a listing for a "Martin Denny," he clarifies, "Denny’s, the restaurant, you stupid fucking lady!" We end up driving aimlessly until Stretch spots a little taco joint in the Mission, the only florescent storefront left glowing on the block.

We all peel out of the limo and van to wait on the curb where a drunk girl is puking into a garbage bin marked COMPOST ONLY and a passed-out homeless man is blocking a dumbfounded couple from entering their apartment building. The limo teens look like they’re freezing. One, wearing a sleeveless sequined dress, has visibly chattering teeth. Earlier I’d had a conversation with this girl, about why she loves Kreayshawn so much, and she had told me, "She shares so much with us."

Maybe this explains Kreayshawn’s fame: When she thinks something or feels something, she puts her face in front of a webcam or pulls up her Twitter and broadcasts those feelings. If she happens to consider restraint for a moment, that thought goes online, too. It doesn’t matter that she may not be a profound technical rapper or if she looks like a hot mess. Her ability to expose and be exposed is her real, unique talent. She’s probably closer than most of us to what future human beings will be like.

Kreayshawn had been plucking at her phone all night—texting, tweeting, filming—and, of course, at 4 A.M., it was dead. For the first time since I’d met her, she’s without a link to the larger world. On the street now, shrinking inside a dark blue hoodie and without her hulking manager standing over her protectively, she blends in pretty seamlessly with her circle of 16-year-old fans. A trio of Indian guys walk by, smoking cigarettes. Kreayshawn calls out, "Hey! I’m Lady Gaga! Gimme a cigarette." They don’t even turn around.

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